Our Condolences to the Family & Friends of Rosemary Mayer

We are saddened by the news that Rosemary Mayer, an adjunct professor in the English Department at Long Island University from 1988 to 2009, died on Saturday morning, October 18, after a long illness. In recent years, she was a lecturer in the Fine Arts Department at LaGuardia Community College.Rosemary was born in Ridgewood, Queens and lived in New York for most of her life. She studied classics at St. Joseph’s College and at the University of Iowa and art at the School of Visual Arts and the Brooklyn Museum Art School. She was most well-known for her sculptural work and installations in the 1970s and 1980s as well as her involvement in the feminist art movement. Her translation of the diary of the Italian Mannerist artist Jacopo da Pontormo, which included a catalogue of Mayer’s work, was published in 1979. Her most recent projects involved illustrating the epic stories of Beowulf and Gilgamesh and the history of the women of the Roman Empire. She received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Council on the Arts, and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. She had solo exhibitions at A.I.R Gallery, the Monique Knowlton Gallery, the Pam Adler Gallery, among many others.She lived for forty years in a loft in Tribeca and most recently in Park Slope, Brooklyn.